Perhaps more than all the campaigns of the Union armies, the Union naval blockade--covering all major Southern ports along 3,500 miles of coastline for the duration of the war--brought down the Confederacy. The daring exploits of Confederate blockade runners are well known--but many of them were British citizens operating out of neutral ports such as Nassau, Havana and Bermuda. Focusing on British involvement in the war, this history names the overseas bankers and manufacturers who, in critical need of cotton and other Confederate exports, financed and equipped the fast little ships that ran the blockade. The author attempts to disentangle the names and aliases of the captains--many of whom were Royal Navy officers on temporary leave--and tells their stories in their own words.

The untold story of Joannes Wyllie, son of a gardener from Fife, one of the most successful blockade runners of the American Civil War Features his life of adventure and action; he was once declared dead, survived shipwrecks and shark attack, and successfully commanded ships across the globe The most comprehensive history of the Ad-Vance is provided, from departing Glasgow until capture off the Carolina coast

William Watson published his account of the two years he spent evading Union gunboats and dealing with the "sharpers" who fed off the misfortune of war in 1892. Using log books, personal papers, and business memoranda, he sought to write a "plain, blunt" account of "events just as they happened." Instead, he wrote a classic adventure tale whose careful description of seafaring in the 1860s gives us a glimpse into a world now closed to us. Watson is the protagonist, but he shares his story with his ship, the Rob Roy, a center-board schooner whose shallow draft and wide beam made it the ideal vessel for slipping over shoals and dashing in and out of blockaded ports. He peoples his account with the good, the bad, and the unlucky, from the likeable and irrepressible Captain Dave McLusky to the loathsome and dishonest Mr. R. M. He takes his reader from Havana, where land sharks greeted incoming sailors, to Galveston, where sharp businessmen and corrupt officials connived to confiscate both profits and ships. He stops at Matamora, a dusty place on "a bare and barren coast," and he visits General Magruder in Houston. His crew brave gales and a hurricane that drives the Rob Roy back thirty miles; and he survives plots against his ship and his life. Through it all, Watson enjoys himself. Blockade running, he declares, was not "unlawful or dishonourable." Rather, it was "a bold and daring enterprise," an "exciting sport of the higher order," like racing yachts, and an almost obligatory act of defiance of a blockade "maintained by no other right than by the force of arms." The "commission merchants" did better than the blockade runners. But Watson recalled his years dodging federal gunboats and outwitting petty officials, treacherous crew, and dishonest businessmen as "much more congenial than the extortions and deceitful wheedling and trickeries of the legitimate trade." This is an adventure story held together by the nuts and bolts of sailing. Watson's discussion of why sail was superior to steam for running blockades is superb; his detailed accounts of surviving gales and outrunning Federal cruisers are fascinating. He takes yellow fever and high sea chases in stride. Through it all, he maintains his honor and guards his profits. For the reader who wants to ply the Gulf of Mexico under sail, play the lottery in Havana, and visit Texas when it was "a new country," Watson is the perfect guide to run the blockade that time imposes on posterity.